Ask GH

Spencer Blanchard

We have 500K+ from our app. We don't send many emails but our product/service is very seasonal so we recently ramped up to around 1-2 emails a week for our busy season. Long story short, we are now in the SPAM folder for gmail. Our open rate took a huge hit. What we have done: -DKIM -SPF What we are doing: -DMARC Any help is greatly appreciated.

In my experience - completing the authentication stuff like DKIM/SPF/DMARC will make a good difference.

Otherwise, there's a ton of factors that go into deliverability but at a high level, I think of it as coming down to relevance and managing expectations. It could be that, despite the seasonal nature of your product/service, that your subscribers/users didn't expect that sudden frequency ramp up.

Another aspect is that they might not be finding your messages as relevant or helpful as they could be so that you should be looking to improve segmentation & personalization.

This happened to us a couple of years back. Our authority took a hit and email open rates dropped. To come back up, for the next 3 months, we did the following things:

1. Significantly reduced the volume of emails going out. Meantime to reach the customer used notifications or another mailing accounts
2. Sent only transactional emails or emails to our power users where open rates were really good. Doing this repeatedly sent positive signals and gradually improved the authority.
3. Kept a couple of backup domains for always distributing the load during peak seasons. Thus, not loading the core account with too much.